This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

"The Rite": a "true" story about training an Exorcist?

“The Rite”, based on a book by Matt Baglio and directed by Mikhael Hafstrom, is supposed to be a true story of how a likeable young seminarian Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue) became one of the country’s few licensed Exorcists, and he had to learn his craft in Rome from the masterFather Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hopkins), who, the logic of storytelling demands, would need an exorcism himself. The film mentions an interesting point, that demonic possession is becoming epidemic and pandemic, as if like in "28 Days Later".

Hopkins here does a repeat performance; it seemed to me that ten years ago he was a lot more convincing as a Hannibal about to return to public life. (Remember the open skull and dinner in that movie?)

In the beginning, Michael is confronted with a choice between becoming a mortician (the family business, and not just a front for Halloween, like the Black Suit that I used to wear) and a priest. At one point another student asks him if he’s gay (remember, the Vatican recently wrote about “incompatibility” because lack of “paternity”), but his real problem is “Doubt”.Yup, he has to be a doubter before he can become a believer, as was Mother Teresa, and Father Trevant.

The sequences in this movie seem a bit arbitrary; there’s not the steady progression that we saw in the 1973 masterpiece “The Exorcist”. You want to see Kovak more engaged, even at risk, physically (and maybe Trevant's many cats should like him). But there’s a great line where Kovak tells the Devil in Trevant to “Leave”.I remember one evening in 2005 when someone said that to me in a bar, early, before it was crowded, when I seemed like a lurking millstone.

New Line now goes through the Warner Brothers trademark to introduce itself as the owner of the film. It’s fallen a bit since its glory days with the LOTR films.

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